To celebrate Halloween, I thought you might find this article by Professor Aaron Schwabach interesting. It is entitled Harry Potter and the Unforgivable Curses: Norm-formation, Inconsistency, and the Rule of Law in the Wizardy World. It already has a following, ranking as the 11th most popular SSRN download relating to international law. The key question is...
Well, it’s a start, I guess. In the absence of President Jed Bartlett ruminating about the legality of assassination on the West Wing, it’s actually this science fiction series that engages issues of international law/ international relations more than any other TV show. Including probably the evening news. On last week’s episode, a sitting President authorized a...
There is one aspect of the Military Commissions Act that appears to have been overlooked by most commentators thus far. It is an extremely important provision as it relates to how the courts will interpret the Geneva Conventions as implemented through the MCA. Section 6 of the MCA includes a number of important interpretive instructions regarding the implementation of the...
See this report from a "Focus on the Family" site, which frets that the new focus on international law is "lessening [future lawyers] respect for the Constitution." ...
Noah Feldman has the cover story from today’s NY Times Magazine on the fear over an "Islamic bomb." His essay not only covers the oft-cited “Iran bombing Israel” scenario, but also mentions the risk of Sunni-Shiite war across the Middle East, concerns of the results of a Saudi break-up, and more. But, unlike some essayists who simply spin nightmare scenarios, Feldman...
Robert Fisk has a troubling story in the Independent (UK) today raising the possibility that Israel used uranium-based weapons against Hezbollah targets during the recent conflict:[S]cientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting between Hizbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops last July and August, suggests that uranium-based munitions may now also...
Last Thursday, ICJ President Roslyn Higgins Q.C. delivered a sort of "state of the ICJ" speech to the U.N. General Assembly along with the Annual Report of the ICJ. As longtime readers of this blog may recall, teasing the ICJ about its self-importance and inefficiency is a favorite hobby-horse of mine. Judge Higgins' speech and the 2005/2006 Annual Report...
Last month, as I reported here, Chile's Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that stripped Pinochet of his immunity in a case involving Chile's infamous Villa Grimaldi prison, where the current President, Michelle Bachelet, was tortured in 1975. A Chilean magistrate judge, Alejandro Solis, has now filed formal charges against the former dictator and issued a warrant for...
The reason I did not blog in the past few days is that I have been stuck in a most interesting discussion about whether there can be any place for human rights considerations in the WTO (see below Vietnam Wins Invitation to Join the WTO and The WTO...
I’m in Ottawa for a few days, attending the annual meeting of the Canadian Council on International Law – Canada’s equivalent to ASIL, but smaller. Fewer folks aside, the conference packs a powerful punch. I was here to present a paper, exploring how Principal-Agent theory (and Karen Alter’s Trustee variant) explains the U.S. relationship to the International...
The Supreme Court granted certiarori today in Microsoft v. AT&T, an important and complex case involving the extraterritorial scope of U.S. patent law protections (SCOTUSBlog has the summary here). The case will revolve around the interpretation of 35 U.S.C. 271(f), which prohibits the “suppl[y] * * * from the United States * * * [of] all or a...
The U.N. General Assembly's First Committee on Disarmament and International Security voted overwhelmingly yesterday to recommend the drafting of "a comprehensive, legally binding instrument establishing international standards in the trade on conventional arms." This was long expected, and the vote was a resounding 139-1, with the United States as the only country voting against the resolution (but with 24...
